Fergie's Tech Blog

Google Gadgets Can be Abused by Phishers

Robert McMillan writes on InfoWorld:

The domain used to host small Google Gadget applications written by Web developers could be misused by phishers, a Web security researcher said Friday.

Google Gadgets are little programs that gather information on the Web and then display them on multiple Web pages. They are used to give Webmasters an easy way to display everything from sports scores to astronomical data on their sites.

Unfortunately, they can also be misused by phishers to get around antiphishing filters. Attackers could create a phishing site on the gmodules.com domain and then send that URL to victims. Because Google's gmodules.com domain is trusted by antiphishing filters, victims might then go to the phishing site without being warned by their browser's filtering software.

Security researcher Robert Hansen, a frequent critic of Google, reported the issue to the company's security team, but he was not satisfied with their response. He says Google told him that what he sees as a flaw is simply part of the site's expected behavior. Google couldn't be reached immediately for comment.

posted by Fergie @ 8/17/2007 05:41:00 PM